Vegetables

When a garden hasn’t been doing well, one of the first conditions to check is the soil’s pH, its acid-alkaline balance. The pH scale goes from 0 to 14; 7 is the neutral pH, measurements below 7 are acidic, and measurements above 7 are alkaline.

For reference, distilled salad vinegar has a pH in the range of 2 to 2.5 (acidic), and cold-process soap has a pH in the range of 9 to 10 (alkaline).

Soil pH influences how well plants can take in nutrients from the soil, so getting a garden’s soil into the best pH range for your plants will help them be healthier and more productive.

What is less well-known is that correcting a pH that is either too high or too low takes time. Testing soil pH should be done now, or soon, for gardens that have not done well in the past year.

What pH is good for gardens?

Blueberry plants prefer a soil pH near 5.

Most garden veggies need a soil pH of between 6 and 7. Where I live, northwest of Atlanta, the natural soil pH is lower than that range — it is naturally acidic. With that acidity in mind, many people here routinely add lime to their lawns and gardens without checking the soil pH first, and end up with a soil pH that is too high.

When I worked at the local Extension office and managed the soil samples that went to the soil lab at University of Georgia (UGA), it was not unusual to see some samples with soil pH around 5, but others with pH higher than 8. Those higher pH soil samples were from lawns and gardens that had been limed pretty much every year.

Once, a friend who decided to plant blueberries in the space where she had originally kept a vegetable garden sent a soil sample in to the lab at UGA. The lab found that the pH of her soil was 7. This pH level was not a surprise because she had been spreading ashes from her fireplace on the garden. Wood ashes are a good source of potassium, but they raise the soil pH.

For many veggies, a soil pH of 7 is fine, but the blueberries she hoped to plant in that space prefer a pH closer to 5. That soil needed some work before it would make a good home for blueberries.

How can I find the pH of my garden soil?

Example of easy to use soil pH test kit for home gardeners.

The most reliable method of finding your garden’s soil pH is to send a soil sample to your state’s soil lab. Call your local county Cooperative Extension office to find out how to take a representative soil sample, how to package it, and the lab fee for this service.

Another option is to purchase a pH test kit at a local garden center. One I have used (pictured nearby) includes a container with color chart for comparison, capsules of pH-indicator-powder to add to the container, and instructions.

The basic instructions for this kit, and others:

put a tiny bit of garden soil into the container

add the indicator powder

add water up to a line near the top

put the lid back on the container, then

mix the parts together by shaking the container until color develops.

You find the pH by comparing the color of your sample to the chart on the front of the container.

Sample in pH test kit shows pH of soil in my upper flower bed to be about 6.5.

How to lower a too-high soil pH

The UGA soil lab sent information to my friend about how much aluminum sulfate (the cheapest option) to add in order to bring the pH down to a better level for blueberries. If you know that the pH of your garden soil is too high, but don’t have a lab-recommendation for how to lower it, the amount of elemental sulfur (my preferred option) needed can also be found in a table by Clemson University Extension, in its Changing the pH of your soil publication.

For a soil pH that is only slightly high (about 0.5 higher than the desired level for your plants), one of my county’s former Extension agents used to recommend mixing sphagnum peat into the soil as a quick fix. Iowa State University Extension suggests other amendments that can lower a too-high pH, including “elemental sulfur, aluminum sulfate, iron sulfate, acidifying nitrogen, and organic mulches.”

There is a note, too, that a very high pH (over 8) is hard to bring down. When the local Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden (one of my volunteer groups/projects) was at a location that had a high-pH soil, we added the recommended amount of sulfur several years in a row before the pH started to come down.

How to raise a too-low soil pH

The Iowa State University publication How to change your soil’s pH includes a table showing how much ground limestone will be needed to raise soil pH. If you have hydrated lime handy, and think it might be a “quicker fix” for a too-low pH, please don’t try it. The risk of raising the pH too high with this product, by accident, is large. Lowering the pH after over-liming is difficult and can take a long time. Use ground limestone instead of quick lime or hydrated lime.

It takes more lime to raise pH in a clay soil than in a sandy soil. In general, according to the table in the Iowa State publication, for 100 square feet of clay-soil garden, it takes 5 to 6 pounds of limestone mixed into the top six inches of soil to raise the pH by 0.5.

When is the best time to adjust the soil pH?

For my friend’s blueberries, the UGA lab report recommended that the bushes shouldn’t be planted until 6 months after applying the sulfur. If she added the sulfur in October, that means blueberry-planting should — for best effect — wait until April. That is pushing the boundary for good planting time for woody plants like blueberries; as spring progresses and the weather warms, newly planted bushes are less likely to do well. They need time in the soil for their root systems to become established before being stressed by the heat of a Georgia summer.

What this means is that soil testing should be done now, if it hasn’t already been done, so adjustments to pH can be made soon enough to benefit plants that will be planted in spring.

What soil pH is best for my plants?

An article by Lewis Hill, published in Robert Rodale’s The Best Gardening Ideas I Know (1983) includes a list of some garden plants and the pH ranges they prefer. I’ve pulled some of the food plants from his list to post here:

This list may help other gardeners in planning what to plant where, but it is comforting to remember that plants will still grow and produce in soil that is slightly outside their preferred pH range.

This is lucky, since most of us grow many of these plants mixed all together in our gardens. However, for peak production, planting in soil that is actually the preferred pH for each crop works best.

Succession planting with preferred pH for each crop in mind

When I plant Irish-type potatoes in the spring, I will have added some sphagnum peat to their soil to bring the pH down a bit, but not all the way down to 5. Knowing the pH preferences of other crops helps me know what to plant after the potatoes in that space. For example, cabbages in that space would likely be a total bust, because their pH preference is so much higher (7 to 7.5!).

After potatoes are harvested, a better option than cabbages would be to let a nearby vining crop, like melons, sprawl across that space. Another option would be to plant a crop there that prefers a lower pH range, like beans or cowpeas that thrive at pH 5.75-6.5.

Food growing in the yard might not count as “convenience food,” but it can be mighty convenient. Sometimes, when I am putting supper together and missing an ingredient, a decent substitute is out in my organic garden.

Most recently, the needed ingredient was cooked spinach. Some years, I have plenty of spinach in the garden, but the local wild bunnies demolished this year’s spinach patch. The good news is that greens are probably the easiest veggie to substitute from the garden.

Chicory as a substitute for spinach in cooking

I have a little patch of kale, which would work as a spinach-substitute if there were more of it. You may remember, though, my patch of chicory, defended from the bunnies by a blockade of sticks. The blockade, after I added a lot more sticks, did work, and the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, selected for its roots used in making chicory coffee, grew.

Chicory to the left shows the bunny-damaged chicory patch before I beefed-up the stick blockade.

I harvested about a third of the leaves from the patch, to use as a spinach substitute, in my recent vegetable lasagna.

Picture to the right shows the successfully-defended chicory patch, with taller sticks still visible, poking up around the plants.

Some of the roots are finally large enough that I will dig them up in the next few weeks to make my coffee. This is a benefit of living in the South: the ground will not be frozen anytime soon. Digging up roots is still possible.

I will say, though, that the leaves of the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, chosen for its roots, are not as tasty as the leaves of some other chicories I have grown in the past, like the ‘Italiko rosso’ in the picture to the left.

The problem with the ‘Magdeburg’ chicory leaves is an intensified bitterness. I had to boil and drain the ‘Magdeburg’ leaves a couple of times to get to an acceptably-low level of bitterness. ‘Italiko rosso’ is mildly bitter, but I have never had to do the boil-then-drain thing with that variety.

Convenient herb tea from the yard

Another convenient plant in the garden right now is oregano. In a few weeks, the oregano patch will lose a lot of its leaves, but — here in early December — it still looks great. The patch is thick with fresh, fragrant leaves.

We use our fresh herbs pretty frequently in cooking. I hadn’t thought, though, about using oregano to make an herbal tea until I read about it last week.

Since I like to use crops-in-the-yard as fully as possible, oregano tea seemed like a thing to try.

An old (2017) article on Livestrong.com tells about some potential benefits of oregano, especially oregano oil, but is very careful to not make a lot of overblown health claims for the tea. I appreciate the cautious approach!

I made tea using fresh oregano leaves on two separate days last week. The first day, I added honey and lemon, and the tea was good enough that I made another cup the next day. The second time, though, I drank it “straight”, without any additions. Let me just say that the first version, with honey and lemon, was MUCH better than the second.

If anyone is curious — oregano tea tastes pretty much like oregano. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but finding it out in person made me laugh.

I am having oregano tea again today, with local honey and a squeeze of a lemon-like fruit that was grown by my friend Eddie.

My late-planted home garden cucumbers have been coming into the kitchen for three weeks now. The fridge contains a small pile of them, and I harvested more today, but the cucumber bonanza is nearing its end. The older cucumber leaves have spots/lesions that look like downy mildew; the leaves that still are unspotted and beautifully green droop in the afternoon sun. The droop makes me think that the plants have another disease, in addition to the mildew.

Cucumber plants, wilted in the afternoon sun, but they look fine in the morning and evening, if you ignore the spotted/mildewed older leaves.

There is a bacterial wilt disease for cucumbers that is carried by cucumber beetles. I have checked the plants — leaves, stems, and flowers — very closely, and I have not seen these beetles. I have seen several bumblebees, some brown skipper-type butterflies, a few flea beetles, tiny snails, ants, a tiny native bee, a jumping spider, and one squash beetle on the plants, but those critters are not known to carry the bacterial wilt disease.

It is possible that cucumber beetles are very good at hiding. When I finally pull up the plants, I will check the stems for the white stringy goo that is a sign of bacterial wilt (as seen on the Missouri Botanical Garden page on bacterial wilt).

Today’s harvest of cucumbers and peppers.

Meanwhile, I have a small basketful of cucumbers in my kitchen. Some of them will be peeled before we eat them, because something else has scraped the outer part of the skins. If I had found cucumber beetles, I would have suspected that they caused the damage. Since I haven’t seen those beetles, and since squash beetle damage looks different (remember the semicircular troughs?), tiny snails are my current top suspects.

It is hard to say whether the cucumber part of my late-summer-garden-experiment is a bust. The harvest seems short (three+ weeks), but we have a lot of cucumbers. The zucchini part is definitely a bust. There is zero chance of getting zucchini from the sad plants in the half-barrel garden.

Of course, the pepper plants continue to grow and make peppers, unmarred by disease. Some stink bugs have found them and blemished the skins a bit, but the peppers are all still good enough. The late-planted basil will be big enough for pesto soon. Chicory is looking good, too, and so are the carrots and assorted radishes.

I will transplant the rest of my cool-season seedlings into the garden this week. Currently, they are in a flat, where I planted them in late August. The new crops are kale, spinach, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. Those will all provide food for our kitchen in the cooler months ahead.

Since trap crops take up some space, it never occurred to me that using these was a suitable organic pest control strategy for small home gardens. However, I have unexpectedly gained experience with a trap crop, since that is what my zucchini have turned out to be.

What is a trap crop?

A trap crop is one that is planted as a lure to pest insects, to keep them away from the main crop. Most trap crops are not expected to yield a harvest; instead, they are offered up to pests as an alternative to the main crop of a farm. According to SARE, trap crops are often planted around the edge of the main crop, forming a protective barrier that pests are likely to stay within. Trap crops can also be planted as a block or patch near the main crop.

According to University of Georgia, trap crops to work best when they make flowers before the main crop that they are protecting. When the plants are making flowers and fruits, that is when they are most attractive to most pests.

My zucchini plants function as a trap crop

You may have read the two recent blog posts about pests on my zucchini plants — one about squash beetles and the other about cucumber pickleworms. The squash beetles are really less of a problem, since there are only four or five each day for me to smash and the damage is limited to holes in the leaves. The pickleworms, though, are another story.

They have caused serious damage to the zucchini plants, ruining flowers and boring into main-stems and leaf-stems. The plants are still standing, but all hope of harvesting zucchini from this late-summer crop is gone.

This is the good news: my cucumber patch, planted in early August like the zucchini, has supplied several cucumbers for our meals already. Checking the cucumber plants nearly every day, I have found only a few squash beetles, grand-total, on the plants. It has been easy to find and smash the one-every-few-days beetles as I check on the garden.

In an instance of amazing good luck, my zucchini variety was so fast to mature that the plants made flowers more than a week before the cucumbers did. When the pests first showed up in my garden, the squash beetles and cucumber pickleworm moths flew past the cucumber patch, which didn’t have flowers, and attacked the zucchini plants in the half-barrel planter, where flowers and little squashes were abundant.

To combat any pickleworms that could be present, I have been treating both sets of plants with Bt for caterpillars (the one I am using is Thuricide), which is an organic pest control product. We have had a lot of rain, though, which washes the Bt away. I am not re-spraying my plants after every rain, so some days the cucumber crop is unprotected other than by the stronger allure of the zucchini plants.

At this point, the three remaining zucchini plants look hopelessly ragged, but they are still alive. I am leaving them in the garden for as long as they continue to work as pest-magnets.

The cucumbers remain pickleworm-free, but they are not perfect specimens. I had forgotten about the uneven pollination in hot weather that results in lumpy cucumbers. These are not headed for a pickle jar, which means the imperfect shapes are not really a problem.

Because of pest-concerns, I am harvesting the cucumbers while they are fairly small. This is a bit like harvesting tomatoes before they are fully red. I know that if I leave tomatoes in the garden to fully ripen, some pest (stink bug, chipmunk, mockingbird, etc) will notice the beautiful, ripe fruit and take a bite before I get a chance to enjoy the harvest, myself.

Unlike for tomatoes, there is not a flavor-reason to wait for more mature cucumbers. They taste pretty much the same at smaller sizes, and leaving them out in the pest-filled world seems a little like tempting fate.

So, as I ponder my next year’s garden, it is good to know that zucchini plants can use some unseen come-hither chemistry to draw pests away from the cucumbers.

This is the kind of garden-discovery that any of us can make. I have been growing food in this yard for more than 25 years, and I learn more about gardening every year. And even though there are pests, the garden is producing good food. This is part of the joy of gardening!

The 2018 Annual Conference of the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was in Atlanta this past week. Bus tours of local community gardens were part of the conference. The bus tour option I chose (there were several – all looked good!) was for community gardens in Clarkston, which is a little Southeast of Atlanta.

Our bus tour guide, Bobby, said he’d heard Clarkston called both “the most diverse square mile in the U.S.”, and “Ellis Island South.” One organizer for a garden we visited told us that students from 65 nations attend the local high school.

Our bus stopped at the North Dekalb Mall Community Garden, the Community Garden at Clarkston Community Center, the Clarkston International Garden at 40 Oaks Preserve, the Friends of Refugees Garden at Jolly Avenue, and the Community Garden at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Gardeners at these gardens mostly do not speak English. Many are from countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa.

Uncommon garden crops

Cocoyam

One member of our tour group lives in New York now, but he grew up in Ghana. Luckily, he recognized the cocoyam that we saw in the gardens. Otherwise, I would probably still be trying to identify it! According to the cocoyam description at Plant Village, there are two kinds of cocoyam. The leaves of one type are edible at maturity, in addition to having an edible root. Leaves of the other kind are edible only when young.

Thai basil

Thai basil and lemongrass are not totally unfamiliar (unlike cocoyam), but I don’t normally see them in community gardens. BBC offers many recipes that use Thai basil. In general, the leaves are used in pho (soup) and curries.

Amaranth

We actually saw more than one kind of amaranth. Some, I think, were grown for the leaves (cook them like spinach), and others for the seeds. I have grown a grain amaranth before, but my experience was that separating the seeds from the rest of the plant bits was not easy. Will Bonsall (Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening) wrote about his amaranth experience, saying:

“Looking at my first amaranth crop I was somewhat disappointed to see that, although the yield of biomass was impressive, the grain yield seemed much less than, say, wheat, although they are said to yield comparably. When I hefted the bucket of grain, however, I was far more impressed. It was like lead, and I had to conclude that such a dense grain must really be as nutrient packed as they say.”

He had winnowed his crop on a breezy day, and he grinds the grain (passing the tiny seeds through a hand mill fourtimes) to use in pancakes and waffles.

Tree collards

I have actually read about tree collards before, but it seemed likely that they would be attacked by caterpillars just like other cabbage-family plants, so I never looked into growing them myself. Maybe I should change that! The tree collards growing at the Clarkston Community Center garden looked great.

Roselle

This is another crop that I had read about and then dismissed as one I would not be interested in. The bright red calyxes (flower parts) are used in teas like ‘Red Zinger‘, and I have never liked those teas. They seem slimy to me. However, while at Community Garden at North Dekalb Mall, I was offered a leaf to taste.

The flavor was tart, like sorrel (sheep sorrel in the yard, or French sorrel planted on purpose). Looking it up when I got home, I found that another name for roselle is sour leaf. Apparently, the plants are grown just as much for the leaves as for the calyxes.

“Roselle became and remained a common home garden crop throughout southern and central Florida until after World War II when this area began to develop rapidly and home gardening and preserving declined. Mrs. Edith Trebell of Estero, Florida, was one of the last remaining suppliers of roselle jelly. In February, 1961, I purchased the last 2 jars made from the small crop salvaged following the 1960 hurricane and before frost killed all her plants.”

The book chapter also describes using the red calyxes to make a dish that tastes like cranberry sauce. Since cranberries do not grow well in north Georgia, this could be another reason to grow some roselle.

“Mature and dry beans have got a high amount of cyanogenic glycosides in them. Not good for you.”

But, he offers this hope:

“Mature or dry beans must not be eaten raw. They have to be cooked. That means boiling soft raw mature beans or roasting as heat drives away the toxin. If they have dried — read they are hard — that means soaking overnight then boiling them a long time in a lot of water. Or, boil unsoaked dry beans in a lot of water twice. “

More hope: he says that young beans, leaves, and flowers can be eaten without all that extra work. Read his linked article find out how to prepare these other plant parts.

Bitter melon

Flower of bitter melon, with bee. PHOTO/Amygwh

This vegetable seemed to be very popular at the gardens we visited. The vines covered many of the fences used to separate the garden plots. We were told that the fruits truly are bitter, but that the bitterness could be reduced.

“Bitter melon has twice the beta carotene of broccoli, twice the potassium of bananas, and twice the calcium of spinach. It also contains high amounts of fiber, phosphorous, and Vitamins C, B1, B2, and B3.”

In addition, the fruits are used in herbal medicines in Asia, Africa, and India, for a wide range of complaints, from gout, to cancer, to graying hair (see TSU’s linked publication for fuller list).

Any uncommon crops in your garden?

My most “uncommon crop” is chicory (many kinds). I do snack on garden weeds while in the yard, which might count for something, but I am not an adventurous eater. When I was a child, the foods I was most likely to eat were peanut butter sandwiches, Cheerios, and canned green beans. These many years later, my list of acceptable foods is still not super-long.

The good news about chicory is that, like so many of the uncommon crops I saw last Saturday at the refugee gardens, chicory is unbothered by pests, and it is drought tolerant. Also, if I put chicory on pizza or in bean soup, I can eat it.

Over the past couple of days, I have noticed that several flower buds on my zucchini squash plants don’t look healthy. The flower buds have stayed small and turned pale and droopy. Today, I finally took the time to REALLY inspect my plants. What I saw is a lot of bad news.

The holes in the flower buds and the holes in the stems could — possibly — be caused by several kinds of insects. However, the piles of pale green, round globs like tapioca, and the yellow globs too, are most likely frass (poo) from caterpillars.

Around here, a major cause of this kind of damage is squash vine borers. The adult moths lay eggs on the plants. Then, the tiny caterpillars that hatch out of the eggs eat their way inside the plant, where they eat and eat until they have killed the plant from the inside.

I pulled up two of my five zucchini plants to try to find the culprits/caterpillars. As I dissected the plants, this is what I found:

What are pickleworms?

Pickleworms, the caterpillars of a night-flying moth, are a common summertime pest in the South. They are pests I have seen before, but I have not seen such extensive damage to plants from their activity before. Who knew that they would gnaw right into a stem? Not me. At least, not until now.

If the damage had been from squash vine borers, I would have pulled up all five of the zucchini plants and called them an interesting late-summer experiment that I never need to repeat. Since the damage is from pickleworms, I am trying another option. That second option is the use of an organic-approved product for caterpillars.

Organic control for pickleworms

I have mixed up some “Bt for caterpillars” – the product at my house is Thuricide, but others are available – and I’ve sprayed it all over the stems and flower buds of the remaining zucchini plants and my little patch of cucumbers. The name “pickleworm”, if you haven’t already guessed, alludes to a fondness for cucumbers. Since I like cucumbers, too, it would be nice to bring any cucumbers that these plants make into my kitchen, without caterpillars inside.

I planted seeds for cucumbers the same day I planted the zucchini. With a time-to-maturity of 65 days, they seemed less likely than the zucchini to make a crop before the first frost, but they are another late-summer garden experiment. Since they have plenty of flowers on them, the odds look good that I might harvest a couple of cucumbers before the end of October.

This hope for cucumbers depends on me and the Bt. It will need to be re-applied every week, and after every rain, for the Bt to work well.

The little orange, dotted beetles that are eating my squash plants actually are in the ladybug family. Most beetles in the ladybug family do not eat plants; instead, they eat pests like aphids and whiteflies and are great helpers in our gardens. Mexican bean beetles and squash beetles, which look a lot alike, are exceptions. They are garden pests.

Right now, it is squash beetles in my garden, eating my squash plants.

It may look like ladybugs are eating my squash plants, but it is really squash beetles doing the damage.

How to identify squash beetles

The first big clue that they are not Mexican bean beetles is that they are on my zucchini, not on beans. Squash beetles eat plants in the squash family, like zucchini, squashes, and cucumbers. Bean beetles eat plants in the bean family.

Another is that their babies, also called larvae, have dark spines. The spines on Mexican bean beetle larvae are yellow, with dark tips as they get older.

Another clue is the method of eating. Both the babies and adults often gnaw a trench around the patch of leaf they are getting ready to eat. You may notice semicircular lines at the edges of damaged leaves.

One theory about why they do this is that the trenching prevents sap from running into the desired area. The sap may carry nasty chemicals that would interfere with the beetles’ eating.

Organic control of squash beetles

For now, I am hand-picking and smashing the beetles, both adults and larvae. The damage on my plants isn’t severe, and the number of beetles is low. Today, I found and smashed seven adults and one larva.

If the infestation gets bad enough that smashing is insufficient, there are a couple of organic-approved options to try. University of Connecticut agrees that hand-picking can work in small gardens but suggests that products containing spinosad might help if a beetle-damage gets very bad.

Another pest in my garden right now is armyworms

Armyworms have eaten most of the leaves in this patch of cleome.

I found armyworms in the garden today, too.

They were on both patches of cleome (spider flowers), and they haven’t left many leaves. When I realized what the pests were, I removed all the plants, with caterpillars attached, and stuffed them into a large bag.

That bag is now sealed up and ready for the municipal compost truck to pick up on Friday.

Armyworms can eat a garden to the ground in just a few days, which is why extreme steps are needed. If you see these in your garden, do not delay even one day in removing them!

Better news in the garden

First leaves on carrot seedlings are strappy and narrow; the next leaves are more feathery. PHOTO/Amygwh

Elsewhere in the garden, the carrot seedlings are sending up the “true” leaves that come after the first leaves. The first leaves that come out of a seed rarely look like the leaves on a mature plant.

For carrots, the first leaves are narrow and strappy. They are the ones that unfolded out of the seed, which is why the first leaves are often called seed leaves.

Do you see the seedling on the far right in the photo? The one leaf that is wider and more feathery gives a clue what the mature leaves will look like.

Also in the garden, there are tiny caterpillars on the pipevine plant. I planted the pipevine with these caterpillars in mind. If all goes well, a few of them will survive to become pipevine swallowtail butterflies, which are beautiful.

Uncommon Ground restaurant and organic farm, in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, doesn’t have much exposed soil to work with. The restaurant building sits at the intersection of two streets, and a parking lot wraps the other two sides.

Not too surprisingly, large containers, raised beds, and trellises are key parts of the farm. Uncommon Ground also uses existing structures to provide more space for growing.

The ways it has expanded to make full use of the small lot may help other gardeners working with limited space think of new ways to expand their own little farms.

Rooftop farm

The first idea is the least practical for most of us. In order to make the roof of the restaurant strong enough that the whole farm wouldn’t come crashing down onto diners at their tables, the original wood supports were removed, new metal supports were installed, and those were set more deeply into the ground.

This is not the kind of retrofit that can be done cheaply or easily. However, anyone thinking of building a new shed or workshop in the backyard, in a spot where there is plenty of sunlight, might consider whether installing a mini-rooftop farm is feasible.

If you know a structural engineer or architect, that would be helpful. Working out how to make the structure strong enough to hold the load of soil, water, and plants will require their expertise.

Stair rails as trellises

Installing trellises everywhere possible helps, but using existing structures (and not just the rooftop!) is also good. One feature at Uncommon Ground that is hard to miss is the amazingly productive grapevine threaded through the outside stair rail, all the way up to the roof.

At my house, our grapevine is trained onto the railings of our back deck, but my vine is not nearly as productive as the vine at Uncommon Ground.

Another way I have used existing structures in my gardening in the past was when we lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. I planted cucumbers in pots, then set the pots at the base of our (South-facing) metal-scrollwork porch posts. The cucumbers grew up the scrollwork posts. Harvesting was as easy as stepping out the front door.

One caution

It is important, when planting food crops, to remember not to set them into the ground too close to our homes in the Southeastern U.S. The foundations of our homes have all been chemically treated to deter termites.

The chemicals involved are not rated as being safe for eating, but plant roots don’t know that. The roots would bring the unwelcome chemicals into our plants along with the water and nutrients they need. The chemicals would totally wreck our plans for organically home-grown food!

Walls for plant support

Hop vines at Uncommon Ground are supported by a wall. PHOTO/Amygwh

The most luxuriant hop vine I have ever seen is at Uncommon Ground, supported by a brick wall. In the Southeastern U.S., we might not choose hops as the crop to drape over a wall, due to leaf-disease issues that they get here, but the idea is a good one.

Do you grow climbing forms of nasturtiums, passionfruit, or other vining crops?

If your property has a wall that is not part of the house, in a sunny spot, plants can be espaliered in front of it (little fruit trees), or draped over it, like at Uncommon Ground.

Meanwhile, in my yard

For me, just north of Atlanta, it is time to plant crops that have a listed days-to-maturity of 55-60 days. That includes ‘Detroit dark red’ beets, ‘Little finger’ carrots, and ‘Marvel of 4 Seasons’ lettuce. The carrots and winter radishes that I planted a couple of weeks ago have sent up their first leaves. The fall garden really has begun!

‘Sweet Banana’ peppers mature, when grown from seed, in about 72 days. ‘California Wonder’ bell peppers mature in about 75 days. I have seeds for both of these in my “seed stash” in the fridge. When I was planning my summer, I knew that we would be gone for 77 days. Can you see where this is heading?

I learned that peppers can survive without much attention in my summer garden

Last spring, in mid-April, I started one each of the two kinds of peppers and planted them in my small garden before we left home. They both had just four leaves. They were too tiny to need any kind of support at the time, but I pushed an assortment of wire things into the ground around them, to hold them up as they grew.

No one watered them while we were gone. No one fertilized, and no one weeded.

The pepper production increased after I poured some dilute fish fertilizer around them. As usual, the ‘Sweet banana’ is making many more peppers than the ‘California wonder’. They both will continue to provide peppers until the first hard frost.

Basil, ‘Red Rubin’, is another survivor

Another crop that went into the garden before we went away was ‘Red Rubin’ basil.

I planted these in two separate patches. One patch already had flowers when we returned, but the other still is flower-free. That is the patch I am harvesting basil leaves from, to use in the kitchen.

‘Red Rubin’ has dark purplish leaves and a good basil flavor. The pesto made from it isn’t green, but that is ok.

This variety is resistant to basil downy mildew, which has been ruining basil harvests around here for a few years now. The disease resistance is why I chose this basil as the one to grow while we were away.

Native bees on native plants

Native bee on native coneflower. PHOTO/Amygwh

At last year’s Pollinator Symposium (described on the events page of Monarchs Across GA), I picked up a native coneflower seedling for my garden. The plant grew, and it seems happy; it was flowering when we got back, almost four weeks ago, and it is still making more flowers.

The flowers are attracting some very cute, tiny native bees. These are not the kinds of bees that live in hives; they are more likely to live alone in burrows underground. The one in the picture has pollen caught in the hairs on its back legs.

Are there “survivor” crops in your garden?

If you’ve planted a garden and then not tended it for several (or 11!) weeks, what crops have survived the neglect and managed to produce food?

Some of the many kinds

The first variety I grew may have been ‘Italiko rosso’, a loose-leaf type with red leaf-veins running through its dark green leaves. Others have been ‘Pan di zucchero’, a less bitter variety that makes a head like Romaine lettuces, and ‘Catalogna’, an all-green loose-leaf type. Including chicory in our meals turns out to have been good practice for traveling in Italy, because at restaurants we visited, the cooked greens served with the second course of a meal often were chicory, not spinach.

Bringing home seeds from Italy isn’t allowed, but these two packets were emptied prior to travel. The packets are 7.5 x 4.5 inches — huge!

Radicchio, a heading-plant that is usually red instead of green, is also a kind of chicory. Endive and escarole are other forms of chicory that are familiar in the U.S.

These are all good to think about right now because they are cool-season crops that we can plant in our fall gardens. In general, the loose-leaf forms mature in 45-55 days, and so do most of the radicchios. Those can be planted in my area (zone 7b, with a first frost around Nov. 1) in a couple of weeks.

The heading type ‘Pan di zucchero’ takes 80 or more days to mature — it should already be coming up in the gardens of anyone nearby who wanted to grow it. Gardeners south of Atlanta, with later frost dates, still have time to get that variety started.

All of the above chicories are grown for their leaves, which are a lot less bitter in fall/winter/spring than in summer.

Chicory in the kitchen

I haven’t served chicory as a pile of cooked greens, Italian-style, at home, even when they haven’t been bitter. I am not a huge fan of cooked greens. Instead, I usually add raw leaves to a salad or to soups or sauces, where they end up cooked.

If I were going to cook chicory as a “mess of greens”, I would drop them into boiling water, let cook for about half a minute, drain off the water, then finish cooking in fresh water, just like for any other potentially-bitter green (collards, mustards). When we cook greens this way (because Joe does like greens), much of the bitterness goes down the drain with the water that we pour off.

The chicory in my garden right now

This year, I planted seeds for ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, a variety that has a bigger, tastier root for making chicory coffee.

The seeds went into the garden a few weeks before we left town, but the seedlings were not big enough for me to mulch their patch before we left for the summer. When we got back, the patch was a weedy mess. Among the weeds, though, were some chicory plants.

I weeded as carefully as I could but ended up pulling some chicory plants with the weeds in spite of the care. A few days later, yard-bunnies found the patch and nibbled it nearly to the ground. Wild yard-bunnies can be hard on a garden.

Deciding what to do about wildlife damage is not easy. There are many options for “pest control”, most of which don’t work. In the end, I poked some sticks into the ground near each plant, thinking that the sticks would be an annoyance for the bunnies.

As the plants regrew, the bunnies returned. Last week, I added a lot more sticks to the bunny-blockade. The more-crowded assemblage of sticks looks strange, but it seems to be working.

If all else fails and the bunnies are undeterred, I may be able to find a patch of wild chicory to use in making coffee. The bright blue flowers are easy to spot. The hard part will be finding a patch in an unpolluted place (not by a road, for example), where I can get permission to harvest the roots.

Chicory flowers in Italy are the same as those that grow wild here. PHOTO/Amygwh

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